Human Touch.

Last week I visited an amazing man called Peter. He is a body therapist, which basically means he uses acupuncture, acupressure, massage, reiki and shiatsu for all sorts of skeletal and muscular problems, as well as getting the energy flow back in your body if it’s ‘blocked’. This ‘blocking’ is slightly harder to explain, and I know some people might zone out a little here, but a lot of long-term physical pain in your body is caused by trauma. This trauma can be physical or mental, but both can manifest in the same way, namely, as physical pain. Imagine going through a tragedy and not ever talking to anyone about it. You hold the grief in your body, it has nowhere to go, so it locks itself in. Peter wanted to try and get to the source of my headaches – something which I’ve lived with daily for the last 29 years – through physical manipulation and simple human touch. I will talk about human touch later but right now, let’s talk about trauma.

Scientists are discovering how this trauma is caused by elevated and prolonged cortisol levels (i.e. stress), and it’s actually killing us. High stress can lower your immune system, cause weight gain, raise blood pressure, raise cholesterol, cause heart disease, bring on depression and essentially lowers life expectancy. What is so strange about this, and the reason we have cortisol released in the first place, is that it’s supposed to protect us.

Everyone has heard of ‘fight or flight’ right? We respond to fear, danger or stress by an internal alarm being sounded, which releases cortisol and adrenalin into our bloodstream, preparing our bodies for action. But there has to be a physical release, fight or flight, otherwise stress levels build up, wreaking havoc on our minds and bodies. Imagine yourself as a caveman (I know that’s easier for some of the men I know!), walking out of your cave and coming face to face with a hungry sabre-toothed tiger. Your body knows it has to fight it or scarper, so you throw your spear at it, kill it, and the stress is released. Great. Now imagine it’s today, and you are attending an important business meeting. You walk into the room and come face to face with an ex. Your first impulse is to leave but that’s unprofessional. You also can’t club them over the head, so the stress gets trapped in your body for the next, god know how many hours or days. Did this actually happen to me? Hmm, I will leave that to you to decide.

The point is, stressful situations occur every single day, from road rage to work deadlines, health problems to break ups, and because we are supposed to behave and act a certain way in modern society, we can’t just run away or have a public brawl, so our poor bodies can’t cope. We also tend to not talk about the things that hurt us. My body, according to Peter, is full of unreleased trauma. Unfortunately, he can’t tell me what has caused the trauma, he just knows that he can help release it.

The first thing he told me, after half an hour of examining me from top to toe, is that my pelvis is crooked. So crooked in fact, that my left leg is 1.5 inches longer than my right. That doesn’t mean I limp, but it means I compensate for this tilt by putting stress through my knees, hips, back, shoulders and neck. Not good. Peter said to start with, I needed warming up, which entailed rubbing me vigorously as if I was being scrubbed in a Turkish bath, but without the water, soap or scrubbing brush. Next, he flipped me over and I heard this loud vibrating noise. I was slightly anxious when this giant vibrator approached my buttocks, but Peter assured me this was a very good technique for releasing the tension in the glutes. I’m sure it is! The large vibrator travelled down and up my body for some time, accompanied by fairly painful ‘Oohs’ and ‘Aahs’ from me, until I suddenly got the giggles and said, ‘Do your neighbours know what you do for a living, otherwise they may give you funny looks!’ He laughed, thank God. Next, he began pressing and tapping all my meridian points which, in Chinese medicine, are your energy highways, your Qi (Chee). If your Meridians are blocked, the energy can’t flow, and you become locked. Again, he was doing this to release the stress and trauma in my body. I know it was doing something because at one point, with absolutely no warning, I burst into tears, and Peter said, ‘Good’, which either means he’s an utter Sadist or he knows that it’s helping. That said, at the end of the hour I felt like I’d been thrown around the room.

I’ve subsequently had two more sessions with Peter. The second was even more extreme and quite brutal and I burst into tears several times, letting out fairly guttural animal noises as he prodded and poked me. I also had the most awful headache for days afterwards and when I told him so this morning, at my third appointment, he looked very concerned and showed me, on my arm, how hard he’d been pressing. It was ridiculously soft, like a light massage, but my poor body is so sensitive that it feels like an elephant is standing on it. So today was going to be very gentle acupressure and massage only. Phew. I didn’t cry, I didn’t wince in pain, and I felt so relaxed that I think I drifted off at one point. Then he sat me down and asked me, point blank, when the last time was that I’d had physical contact. Well that threw me.

As you can imagine, living alone with no pets, partner or children, I don’t really get touched that much. I’m a proper hugger and am very tactile with my friends but that is not what he was talking about. He was talking about human touch, skin on skin. Um. I felt a bit embarrassed when I answered, because apart from the odd massage, and an ex-boyfriend nearly 3 years ago, I haven’t been touched at all. Peter frowned at me and said, ‘That’s not good at all, you need to be touched more’, and he simply looked down at his notes and started writing. Well, that’s a helpful comment to be left with and something which is slightly difficult to rectify. How to get touched more. I know some of you will be willing to come up with some more sordid ways this could happen, but I want to keep it PG if you don’t mind.

There has been a lot of research about the healing power of touch. Touch stimulates the production of oxytocin, a chemical in our brain that brings on feelings of closeness and security, leading to decreased anxiety. Some Doctors recommend that elderly patients get pets so that they feel less isolated, as well as it being beneficial when they stroke them. Even a simple hand massage a few times a week has had incredible results. Nursing homes are introducing puppy and baby therapy days so that the residents can interact with them, which has shown to dramatically lower cholesterol and blood pressure. I was also reading about specialised Dementia and Alzheimer care homes that have invested in life-like baby dolls for their patients, and surprisingly the same results have been found as if they were holding the human form. We naturally want to love and nurture. It’s in our genetic make-up.

But not only are we witnessing transformational shifts in old age care across the globe, we now understand the importance of person-centred care and our responsibility to create moments of joy and purposefulness. A GP friend of mine told me that if a weekly massage was on the NHS for every single person in Great Britain, it would probably cut stress-related illness by half and save the UK millions. We have the opportunity to get back to the basics of human needs by some simple changes. Dr. Abraham Verghase, who wrote the incredible book Cutting for Stone, says, ‘The most important innovation in medicine to come in the next 10 years is the power of the human hand.’

So, unless I can find an alternative, I may just be seeing Peter for the foreseeable future, for my hands-on therapy! Not the most cost-effective solution but one I’m happy with for now, especially if he keeps his giant vibrator locked in the cupboard.